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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glesne, Corrine.
Becoming qualitative researchers : an introduction / Corrine Glesne. pages cm
ISBN 978-0-13-385939-3—ISBN 0-13-385939-8
1. Social sciences—Methodology. I. Title.
H61.G555 2014
300.72—dc23
2014031201
ISBN 10: 0-13-385939-8
ISBN 13: 978-0-13-385939-3
about the author
A qualitative research methodologist and educational anthropologist, Corrine Glesne has conducted ethnographic research in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States. Her text Becoming Qualitative Researchers (in its various editions) has been translated into several languages. Corrine was a professor at the University of Vermont for seventeen years. Later, as a traveling professor with an international educational program, she taught and accompanied undergraduates to India, the Philippines, Mexico, New Zealand, and England. In 2011, she embarked on a year-long, multisite qualitative study of the “exemplary” academic art museum for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, resulting in her book The Exemplary Museum: Art and Academia (2013). Corrine did her doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her home is now in Asheville, North Carolina.
introduction: a sense of things to come
In qualitative research, you translate life into text. It is not an exact translation, a mirror image, but a product inspired—or breathed into—by the lives you observe and by what you, as researchers, bring to the setting and research interactions. A friend told me about a conversation she had with her niece Emily, who was taking a required humanities class in literature. Emily had had to read a poem about a woman and a storm, and then write an essay. “The poem made me think about the big storms here in Nebraska, and so I wrote about those storms coming across the prairies,” Emily said. She added, “I got it all wrong.” When her aunt asked her to explain, Emily sighed, “Did you know that a storm in a poem means an affair? I missed the whole point.”
Emily brought her experiences of storms in Nebraska to the poem—that, and her very limited experience with poetry. If she reads (and writes) more poetry and receives additional instruction in poetic interpretation, Emily probably will write very different essays. Although not necessarily right or wrong, some portrayals can be better informed than others. This book is meant to help you become better informed about translating your research experiences—your observations and interviews—through analysis and interpretation into informed and useful texts.
new to this edition
“What can be involved in updating a textbook on research?” my nonacademic friends continue to ask. “How is it possible that the process for doing research changes?”
I reply that methodological perspectives continually change, specifically in qualitative research, an approach noted for its variety and complexity, particularly during these times when issues of difference, plurality, justice, and meaning demand our attention. When the first edition of this text was published (1992), relatively few qualitative methods texts were available, particularly in disciplines other than anthropology. Twenty-three years later, the qualitative research literature is vast, with thick handbooks on topics barely imagined in the early 1990s. This development is exciting, signaling that people in multiple disciplines have turned to qualitative inquiry as a means for exploring and understanding aspects of social life. In the process, however, approaches to and critiques of qualitative methods have proliferated. This expansion is overwhelming for a writer of an introductory text.
One text cannot address all issues that are now part of qualitative research lore. What I can do is to clarify where this text is situated among the array of qualitative theories and methodologies, so you, the reader, are better informed about what you might be getting into through reading this book. I point the way to other books and authors that will help you deepen your knowledge of topics only mentioned or briefly described in this text. I also try to reflect on the methods and procedures discussed in this text and present ways in which they are embraced and challenged in theory and in practice. I also introduce several newer aspects of qualitative research (such as arts based research) that are less discussed in other introductory texts. Some of the specific changes to this text since the last edition (2011) include the following:
1. New textual narratives, figures, tables, and visual imagery have been added throughout the book to exemplify or stimulate thought about the accompanying discussions.
2. To better inform readers about the array of qualitative methodological possibilities, this edition includes discussion of more methodologies within the text, as well as in an appendix.
3. Chapter 2 has been reorganized and expanded to better assist novice researchers through the steps of creating research proposals.
4. Chapter 3 includes more discussion about fieldnotes, along with new examples.
5. In Chapter 4, the section on developing interview questions has been expanded.
6. Chapter 6 on research ethics has been reorganized and extended to address the history and concerns of Institutional Review Boards. It discusses the codes of ethics of various disciplines in the United States and elsewhere.
7. Chapter 7 on data analysis pays more attention to coding procedures, along with new examples.
8. Chapter 8 on writing up research includes discussion on research representation and explores some of the issues associated with the “crisis of representation.”
9. Chapter 9 has been revised to focus on arts based research, including examples of various creative ways to approach and/or represent qualitative work.
10. A section on presenting at conferences and an expanded discussion of publishing have been added to the last chapter to encourage new researchers to widely share their work.
suggestions FoR using the text
Chapters tend to compartmentalize thoughts, giving the impression that data collection, for example, is distinct from data analysis. Although the activities of qualitative inquiry tend to be ongoing and overlapping, I use chapters to focus
upon one research aspect at a time. My guiding principle throughout these pages has been to create a book I would want to use as a primary text to help others learn to conduct qualitative inquiry. The book therefore guides you through the research process, with separate chapters on philosophical foundations (Chapter 1), research design (Chapter 2), participant observation and document collection (Chapter 3), interviewing (Chapter 4), data analysis (Chapter 7), and writing (Chapter 8). Other chapters focus on issues of field relationships, rapport, and reflexivity (Chapter 5); research ethics (Chapter 6); and the relatively new area of arts based research (Chapter 9). The final chapter both summarizes and looks forward to ways in which the research and its process may be applied and helpful to you and to others.
Some reviewers have suggested that the order of the chapters be rearranged so that all the “foundational” ones come first (i.e., the chapters on philosophical foundations (Chapter 1), design (Chapter 2), field relationships (Chapter 5), and ethics (Chapter 6). This makes logical sense and the book could easily be read or taught in that order. For me and some of my colleagues, however, the semester time-limit and our desire to include the assignment of a pilot project to accompany the text imposes the order of the chapters as they are. By jumping into reading about research methods after the chapter on research design, students can more quickly conceive a plan for a pilot project, begin gaining access, and start scheduling times for data collection while the class reads and discusses chapters on field relationships and research ethics.
The chapters pose subjects, questions, and quandaries with which students, colleagues, and I have struggled. As students in my classes have noted, my most frequent answer to questions raised by qualitative inquiry is “It depends.” In class discussions and in this book, I provide no solutions or absolutes. My goal is to raise questions, thereby indicating what is problematic, and to suggest guidelines for developing your own judgment in order to learn from and manage the complex issues you may encounter.
Because many of you will be working on theses or dissertations, I periodically address some of the particular problems that you might encounter. Many of the text examples are drawn from educational settings, but the book is not limited to the context of schools nor to the needs of scholars of education. The sources of examples are the experiences of students, my own inquiries, the research of colleagues, including Alan Peshkin (who I invited to be coauthor of the first edition), and published works. I am most indebted to my students; they have taught me much about qualitative inquiry. With permission, I identify their examples by their first names, or, for some, by pseudonyms.
From my perspective, acquiring the skill and understanding for conducting qualitative inquiry has three dimensions: reading, doing, and reflecting. Preferably, all three are done simultaneously so that the outcomes of each continually interact. Read widely and deeply about your topic and about the conduct of inquiry throughout the research process; you might want to begin with the “Recommended Readings” sections at the ends of the chapters. Practice qualitative research techniques on problems of significance to you as you read about doing qualitative research.
Ideally, the course is an occasion for supervised pilot studies. Reflect before and after each step in your research journey (from developing your research statement to completing your research report) by keeping a field journal and by holding discussions with peers, supervisors, and research participants. Keeping a field journal that describes your practices and, no less important, your critical reflections on these practices is crucial for doing good research. The field journal, in effect, becomes a personal methods book that contains the insights that result from the interaction of reading, reflecting, and doing research. Learning to reflect on your behavior and thoughts, as well as on the phenomenon under study, creates a means for continuously becoming a better researcher. Becoming a better researcher captures the dynamic nature of the process. Conducting research, like teaching or dancing, can be improved; it cannot be mastered.
PeRsonal Positionings: my methodological gRound(ing)
My background and experience is in ethnographic and case study research, as well as various forms of action research, including participatory action research and collaborative research. I have lived and worked in various parts of the world and have maintained an interest in theories of development and globalization. Even though I attempt to inform myself on inquiry paradigms and methodologies of qualitative research with which I am less familiar, I cannot do justice to them all or even to a portion of them. This section, therefore, delineates some boundaries for this text.
This book is rooted in the interpretive tradition of qualitative inquiry. Although I briefly introduce and make reference throughout the text to critical and postmodern/poststructural traditions, this book is not meant to be a methods book for those seeking to do research within those paradigms—although they may find some of the advice in this text fitting and useful. Within the interpretive tradition, different research approaches developed historically, geographically, and by discipline, including sociology (symbolic interactionism, grounded theory), psychology (phenomenology), and anthropology (ethnography). Ethnography is perhaps the term that is most widely used, whether correctly or not, to refer to research in the interpretive tradition. It also carries with it a lot of baggage in its ties to colonial anthropology. Nonetheless, the research methods associated with ethnography (fieldwork, interviews, observations, document collection) are used in many other qualitative methodologies (although expectations for fieldwork, kinds of interview questions, analysis techniques, and so forth can vary widely). This book focuses on methods used in ethnographic research, including current critiques, challenges, and changes.
I believe in the wisdom of local people, whether in a farming community in Illinois or a barrio in Mexico City; I believe that there are “organic” intellectuals everywhere, working to keep traditions alive and also to shape a changing future. I am partial to inquiry approaches that involve research participants
in the work, particularly in identifying the overarching research question and, thereby, in designing research that will be useful to the people involved. I also believe that much is to be learned from conventional qualitative methods, that you can learn and practice basic techniques and then adapt them as your skills and inclinations guide you. This book, therefore, is meant to be an introductory text to the ethnographic research techniques of data collection, analysis, and writing. Along the way, however, I have added sections that are meant to probe into and complicate some of these practices.
Communicating the process of qualitative inquiry provides me some of the same kinds of rewards that teaching swimming did years ago. At the end of a semester (or, better, two semesters), students no longer fear to jump in, nor are they at risk of drowning in data. With careful, sure strokes, they stride through data collection, analysis, and writing—albeit not without the occasional stormy day. Students gain useful skills that can serve them beyond the thesis and dissertation stages. In return, I have learned much from students about both the process of doing qualitative research and their topical areas. They educate me, for example, about the social construction of developmental disabilities or about the workings of effective partner team-teaching in middle schools. I believe that qualitative research can provide a forum for reflection and communication that results in better programs, gives voice to those who have been marginalized, and assists researchers, participants, and readers to see the world in new ways. For comments, suggestions, or questions, please contact me at ceglesne@yahoo.com.
Corrine Glesne
acknowledgments
Acknowledgments for this edition begin with Kevin Davis of Pearson, who convinced me to revise the text yet again. Although reluctant, I know now that he was right. Being institutionally unaffiliated, I thank him, too, for making available texts that were useful as I reworked the book. I also appreciate the support of Carrie Mollette who was quick to answer my sundry questions, and Margaret Ritchie for her care in copyediting. Many thanks to the reviewers for their suggestions and insight: Lynne Hamer, University of Toledo; Michelle Lorraine Jay, University of South Carolina; Kimberly A. Truong, Northeastern University; and Anita Wadhwa, Harvard University.
I am continuously grateful to Kelly Clark/Keefe, teacher extraordinaire and wonderfully creative friend, who keeps me supplied with captivating artwork and with intriguing examples and thoughts. In addition to thanking colleagues and prior students who graciously allowed me to use their words or photographs in previous editions and that remain in this edition, I want to specifically acknowledge those who have provided images or words appearing for the first time in this edition. Heartfelt thanks to Jane Amundsen, Anna Fariello, Caroline Manheimer, Massimo Schuster, and Jonathan Treat, who provided images and, in Anna’s and Jonathan’s cases, examples from their work for use in this text. Jacob Diaz, Eve Krassner, and Fran Oates kindly allowed me to include selections from their own research, providing inspiration for others. I am indebted to Max Marmor and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for supporting my desire to repurpose data and research notes from the academic art museum study as examples in this book. I am grateful as well for how my involvement in the museum project whetted my interest in museum education and art history and led me to access images of art from open-source resources of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Art for inclusion in this book.
In addition to those who have contributed images and examples, others have assisted me in a variety of ways. Thanks to fiber artist and friend Caroline Manheimer, whose work graces the cover and who often enticed me away from the computer for a walk or to share a meal. Appreciation goes to friend Carol Lawrence, who eased my worries by responding to several chapters I was finding particularly troublesome. In the midst of dissertation work at a university many states away, Skip Grieser e-mailed to thank me for writing the book and suddenly found himself with the added job of responding to some draft chapters for the new edition. Rod Webb provided sage advice and support. Marleen Pugach, Kelly Clark/Keefe, and Caroline White are my dependable, responsive, and brilliant go-to’s when I’m struggling with any sort of question or dilemma. I am grateful.
Brief Contents
CHAPTER 1
Meeting Qualitative Inquiry 1
CHAPTER 2
Research Design and Other Prestudy Tasks: Doing What Is Good for You 29
CHAPTER 3
Being There: Developing Understanding Through Participant Observation, Documents, and Visual Research 64
CHAPTER 4
Making Words Fly: Developing Understanding Through Interviewing 96
CHAPTER 5
Field Relations: Researcher Roles, Rapport, and Reflexivity 131
CHAPTER 6
But Is It Ethical? Considering What Is “Right” 158
CHAPTER 7
Finding Your Story: Data Analysis 183
CHAPTER 8
Crafting Your Story: Writing Up Qualitative Data 218
CHAPTER 9
Improvising a Song of the World: Arts Based Research 243
CHAPTER 10
The Continuing Search 271
Introduction: A Sense of Things to Come iv Acknowledgments ix
CHAPTER 1
Meeting Qualitative Inquiry 1
BEgInnIngS 1
SEARCHIng 3
WAyS of KnoWIng: PARAdIgMS of RESEARCH 5
Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism and Postempiricism 7 / Interpretivism 8 / Critical Theory 10 / Postmodernism/Postcolonialism/Poststructuralism 13 / Mixed Methods 16
METHodology, InQuIRy QuESTIonS, And METHodS: An InTERACTIon 17
InTERPRETIvE TRAdITIonS of QuAlITATIvE InQuIRy 19
Ethnography 21 / Autoethnography 23 / Action Research 24 / Possibilities of Qualitative Inquiry 26
WHAT IS To CoME 27
RECoMMEndEd REAdIngS 27
ExERCISES 28
CHAPTER 2
Research design and other Prestudy Tasks: doing What Is good for you 29
InTRoduCTIon And ConTExT 30
THE RESEARCH ToPIC 32
ConCEPTuAl fRAMEWoRK 34
Seeking Relevant Literature 34 / Using Theory 35 / Creating a Framework for Concepts 37
RESEARCH PuRPoSES 38
ReseaRch statement and Questions 40
selection oF ReseaRch methods 44
selection oF site and PaRticiPants 46
Selection of Site 46 / Selection of Study Participants and Locations for Observations 50
Planning FoR tRustwoRthiness and time 53
Trustworthiness 53 / The Time Frame 54
meeting PaRticiPants: access, ReseaRch summaRies, and the Pilot 57
Gaining and Maintaining Access 57 / The Lay Summary 58 / The Pilot Study 61
Recommended Readings 62
exeRcises 62
chaPteR 3
Being there: developing understanding through Participant observation, documents, and visual Research 64
the PaRticiPant-oBseRvation continuum 65
PaRticiPant-oBseRvation goals 67
the PaRticiPant-oBseRvation PRocess 68
Early Days of Fieldwork 69 / Observations 70 / Fieldnotes 72
FieldwoRK allies: documents, aRtiFacts, and visual data 81
Documents and Artifacts 81 / Visual Data: Photography, Video, Maps, and Diagrams 85
maRginal oR comPanion? 90
Recommended Readings 94
exeRcises 94
chaPteR 4
making words Fly: developing understanding through interviewing 96
But is it ethical? considering what is “Right” 158
ResPect, BeneFicence, and Justice 159
The Principle of Respect: Informed and Voluntary Consent 160 / The Principle of Beneficence: Privacy 161 / The Principle of Justice: The Vulnerable, Reciprocity, and Representation 166
The Possibilities of Words and Other Forms of Presenting Research 274 / Applications of the Research Process 280
concluding woRds 284
Recommended Readings 285
exeRcises 285
Appendix A: Descriptions of Several Qualitative Methodologies 287
Appendix B: Maintaining a Fieldwork Notebook 292
Glossary 295
References 303
Name Index 320
Subject Index 324
CHAPTER 1
Meeting Qualitative Inquiry
Sofie knew and taught me that everyone had some story, every house held a life that could be penetrated and known, if one took the trouble. Stories told to oneself or others could transform the world. Waiting for others to tell their stories, even helping them do so, meant no one could be regarded as completely dull, no place people lived in was without some hope of redemption, achieved by paying attention.
(Myerhoff, 1979, p. 240)
BEgInnIngs
Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff was talking about the grandmother who raised her and who, through her love of people’s stories, perhaps set the course for Myerhoff’s life. Learning to listen well to others’ words and to interpret and retell the accounts is integral to many kinds of qualitative research. Because qualitative researchers seek to make sense of actions and narratives, and the ways in which they intersect, I begin with an account of my connections to research. If you know something about my story, you may better understand and interpret the perspectives in the work that follows. This beginning also contextualizes and introduces you to different research projects that I refer to throughout the book as I draw upon my experiences to illustrate methodological advice and reflections.
I do not remember “discovering” qualitative inquiry. The process, however, is one with which I have been familiar for some time. I grew up in a small, rural midwestern town where almost everyone went to church (no synagogues, no mosques) and almost everyone had European ancestry (mine was Norwegian and Welsh). I grew up interested in people whose lives were different from mine. I read each month’s National Geographic and filled my nights with folktales from around the world. Books such as Arctic Wild (Crisler, 1958) and No Room in the Ark (Moorehead, 1959) from my parents’ bookshelves supplemented library books about travelers, explorers, and adventurers from Genghis Khan to Amelia Earhart. I gravitated toward anthropology as an undergraduate, which allowed me to continue learning about the many different ways people live. For anthropologists, fieldwork—being present in others’ lives—is the method to learning about
another culture. The more I read, the more I wanted to experience life elsewhere. Thus began a postgraduate trek in which I traveled and worked from Wales to Afghanistan. On a kibbutz in Israel, I pollinated date palms, pruned banana plants, picked grapefruit, and grew increasingly interested in tropical agriculture. Later, I lived in Jerusalem and joined a team of archaeologists for a year. I continued with archaeological work in northern Kenya, where I camped in dry riverbeds and walked over tracks of rhinos and lions as I helped to trace the southern migration of people away from the Nile 10,000 years ago. Throughout this period, I kept journals. As I read them now, I am struck by my joy about what I was learning and my frustration about how to make sense of all I was encountering. Constantly stimulated by different ways of doing things and multiple ways of understanding them, I was restless and eager to go beyond experiences. Such desires led me to graduate school with plans to apply anthropology through education. I took courses that provided theory and structure for what I had been doing haphazardly on my own.
My first qualitative research project, my master’s thesis, was an interview and archival study of Illinois rural women who worked the land. As a doctoral student, I assisted Alan peshkin in conducting an ethnography of a fundamentalist Christian school. peshkin moved into the community where the school was located. The other assistant and I spent two days a week at the school throughout one academic year, observing from the back of classrooms and conducting multiplesession interviews with teachers and students.
Before beginning dissertation research, I worked as an action researcher (defined later in this chapter) in Saint vincent and the Grenadines as part of a multiplenation Caribbean Agricultural Extension project under the direction of Michael Quinn patton.1 There I assisted representatives of various farmers’ groups and agricultural organizations to create a national agricultural extension plan. For my dissertation, I returned to Saint vincent to carry out ethnographic research in one rural village, focusing on young people, agriculture, and education.
As a professor at the university of vermont (uvM), I began teaching various courses in qualitative research. Novelists and poets lament that if they are teaching writing, they find little time to write. The same applies to teaching qualitative research. My research was limited to sabbaticals (the first in Costa rica, the second in Oaxaca, Mexico) supplemented by short term evaluation work and a life history project. Although I had been trained in conventional ethnographic methods, by the time I went to Costa rica in 1993, I wanted to do research with and not on others (both conventional and more collaborative research methods are discussed later in this chapter). I volunteered my research skills and worked with an environmental group in the small community in which I was living. Seven years later, my next sabbatical allowed me to continue this mode of research in Oaxaca (discussed in Chapter 2).
In 2002, I received the opportunity to work as a traveling professor with the International honors program (Ihp), a studyabroad program now affiliated with the School for International Training. For nine months, thirty students and three professors lived in six countries studying issues of culture, ecology, and justice,
guided by coordinators, activists, environmentalists, and intellectuals in each country. I continued in various capacities with Ihp for a dozen years, interspersed with other responsibilities such as directing a semester program and teaching courses in Oaxaca, Mexico, for uvM. In 2011, sponsored by the Samuel h. Kress Foundation, I conducted a yearlong study of seven academic art museums and was inspired by ways in which professors and museum personnel collaborated to use art in the teaching of subjects ranging from biology to music (see Glesne, 2012, 2013). I draw upon some of that effort in this book.
From these varied experiences and through insights of others, I have become particularly sensitive to and interested in interactions and relationships between researchers and study participants. I readily acknowledge inquiry purposes that do not focus on serving research participants, but I am personally inclined toward research that contributes to the lives of participants as determined by them, and that perspective will be evident as you continue to read.
This book focuses on approaches to qualitative research primarily within interpretive traditions—with frequent references to challenges to and quandaries within interpretivism. A quotation from The Tao of Painting represents my perspective on learning to do qualitative inquiry:
Some set great value on method, while others pride themselves on dispensing with method. To be without method is deplorable, but to depend on method entirely is worse. you must first learn to observe the rules faithfully; afterwards, modify them according to your intelligence and capacity. (Sze & Wang, 1701/1963, p. 17)
Learning to do qualitative research is like learning to paint. Study the masters, learn techniques and methods, practice them faithfully, and then revise and adapt them to your own persuasions when you know enough to describe the work of those who have influenced you and the ways in which your modifications create new possibilities.
sEARCHIng
Dictionaries define research as a careful and diligent search. We have all been engaged in a variety of careful and diligent searches without necessarily labeling the process research, let alone a particular type of research. My mother’s interest in her family’s genealogy is one example of searching. In her pursuits to develop the family tree, she asked questions of great aunts and second cousins; requested that they and other relatives share letters and photo albums; wandered in cemeteries in towns where ancestors had lived; and sent for documents from hospitals, town clerks, and churches. From these sources, she carefully and diligently traced her ancestral history, recording both the dates of significant events (births, marriages, deaths) and the stories she heard (such as of Thomas pettit, who, in the early 1600s, became a Bostonian “freethinker” and was whipped and “kept in hould” by local puritans until able to join Anne hutchison sympathizers and move further west).
As students some of you may have conducted searches without having been assigned to do so. For example, a group of undergraduates living in a residence hall became increasingly dissatisfied with the selection of food provided by the food service. They complained, but nothing changed. Over a particularly unsatisfactory meal, they decided to develop a survey that took shape as a series of statements followed by a five point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. They typed it up, discussed it at a hall meeting, and got the resident hall adviser to make copies, which were distributed via mailboxes. respondents were asked to deposit the survey in a designated box by a certain date. On that date, the students collected the surveys and tallied the numbers, learning what proportion of residents responded and how those residents felt about certain aspects of the food service. Armed with numbers, they created a written summary and sent it to the school newspaper, the university president, and the food service.
As professionals, you may have continued to conduct searches. A middle school English teacher was struck each September by a pattern of frightened, uncertain new students. She had a hunch that teachers, administrators, and older students could do something to ease the transition but was not sure what. So she asked her sixth, seventh, and eighthgrade classes to write essays about how they felt during their first few days as sixthgraders, what made the experience good, what made the experience bad, and what could be changed to make it better. Then, working with the students, the teacher prepared a report for presentation to staff and administration, suggesting steps that the school could take to welcome sixthgraders into middle school.
In all three of these examples, people were engaged in research. They deliberately set out to collect data for specified purposes. In all three cases, data might have been collected more carefully, but the point is that people carry out research of all sorts in their everyday lives—even though they may not name the methods they use or be aware of how to improve the process so the results are more trustworthy or of greater use. This book is meant to help you approach qualitative research in ways that are thoughtful and useful.
Some of you may have been conditioned to think of research as a process that uses an instrument such as a survey, involves a large number of people, and is analyzed by reducing data to numbers. This mode of inquiry, as demonstrated by the food survey, uses quantitative research methods. The middle school example and parts of the genealogical search show the researcher gathering words by talking with a small number of people, collecting a variety of documents, and, in the middle school example, observing behavior. Both of these cases use qualitative approaches.
The two modes of inquiry are frequently contrasted. Quantitative and qualitative researchers, however, use similar elements in their work. They state a purpose, pose a problem or raise a question, define a research population, select research methods, develop a time frame, collect and analyze data, and present outcomes. They also rely (explicitly or implicitly) on theory and are concerned with rigor. Nonetheless, how researchers go about putting these elements together makes for distinctive differences in the research processes and products as discussed in the next section on research paradigms.
WAys of KnoWIng: PARAdIgMs of REsEARCH
paradigms are frameworks that function as maps or guides for scientific communities, determining important problems or issues for its members to address and defining acceptable theories or explanations, methods, and techniques to solve defined problems.
(r. usher, 1996, p. 15)
The concept of research paradigms grew out of work by Thomas Kuhn, who published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. Kuhn, trained as a theoretical physicist, had a strong interest in philosophy. While a doctoral candidate, he became intrigued by how history informed the philosophy of science (Loving, 1997). The book that resulted from this exploration began a philosophical revolution in the practice of science. Before its publication, Western scientists tended to believe that research built upon itself, progressively increasing a body of knowledge. referred to as logical positivism, this paradigm held that knowledge was “limited to what could be logically deduced from theory, operationally measured, and empirically replicated” (patton, 2002, p. 92). Although science, at the time, was viewed as objective, neutral, and valuefree, Kuhn demonstrated how science was often an ideological battleground where ideas and explanations competed, and those that won tended to be those of the scientists with the most power (economically, politically, socially, etc.). From Kuhn and others came the argument that “data and observations are theoryled, that theory is paradigmled, and that paradigms are historically and culturally located” (r. usher, 1996, p. 16).
A paradigm, then, is a framework or philosophy of science that makes assumptions about the nature of reality and truth, the kinds of questions to explore, and how to go about doing so. The word ontology is often used to refer to beliefs regarding reality or what kinds of things make up the world. “Ontology,” states potter (1996), “is the concern about whether the world exists, and if so, in what form” (p. 36). you might think of the world as one of matter, for example, things you can observe and measure. Or you might see the world as more shaped by the mind, by how the mind perceives, categorizes, and interprets things. What you believe about the nature of reality, in turn, affects the kinds of questions you ask of it, what you consider knowledge to be. Epistemology is the word used to refer to the study of the nature of knowledge. What you believe knowledge to be, in turn, shapes and serves to justify your methodology, your theoretical perspectives about how to go about knowing. Every research study, therefore, is informed by philosophical and theoretical assumptions, even though researchers sometimes are not aware of these influences because they are embedded in the researchers’ suppositions about the nature of reality and knowledge. part of your duty as a researcher is to figure out what philosophical and theoretical perspectives inform the kind of work you choose to do (see Figure 1.1). This introduction is meant to initiate that process, but it is only a beginning. Some sources to help you become more familiar with the thought and language of philosophical and theoretical perspectives that inform research are suggested at the end of this chapter.
Philosophical Assumptions
Ontology: Philosophical beliefs about the nature of reality
Epistemology: Philosophical beliefs about the nature of knowledge
Methodological Framework
The Study
Methodology: Theoretical perspectives about how to go about knowing (ethnography, grounded theory, narrative analysis, causal comparative, etc.)
Your Research Design and Methods
fIgURE 1.1 foundations of a study
For ease of discussion, I classify the philosophical frameworks that guide the work of social scientists into four paradigmatic families: postempiricism, interpretivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. Each should be viewed as loosely bounded and as containing several related schools of thought. They are not rigid, welldefined categories. These paradigms have developed and changed over time, influenced by sociohistorical contexts as well as by thought of scholars from within their own traditions and from other paradigms. To complicate matters, different researchers and authors use different labels for the paradigms, and some labels get associated with various paradigms. Nor is there agreement among social scientists on how many paradigms there are or on how associated methodologies should be divided. My purpose in using the categories proposed here is as a heuristic for making clearer the ways in which research is ensconced in belief systems that offer different purposes for doing research and different ways of making meaning.
As you reflect upon the various paradigms described in the sections to follow, you may find it useful to refer to Table 1.1, which illustrates the purposes and methodologies or analyses associated with various paradigms. Aspects of this table were informed by the work of p atti Lather and Elizabeth St. p ierre (Lather, 2007, p. 164).
Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism and Postempiricism
Empiricism developed and flourished with the r enaissance (1450–1600), as a response, in part, to the power of religion during the Middle Ages. rather than explanations based on religious texts, the empiricists believe they could explain
TABLE 1.1 Paradigms, Purposes, and Methodologies/Analyses
*Term frequently used to describe the family of philosophical frameworks.
**Postpositivism is used by some to refer to a less strict form of positivism, and by others to refer to anything other than the early form of positivism. In the latter use of the term, all the paradigms other than early positivism would be forms of postpositivist thought.
the world and find truth through observations and experimentation. During the Age of Enlightenment (1600–1800), empiricism became viewed as the way to do research, contributing to rapid expansion of knowledge in the physical and natural sciences in Europe.
The term positivism came from Auguste Comte, a nineteenthcentury French philosopher, who advocated modeling research in the social sciences on that used in the natural sciences to create an approach that “would be positive in its attempts to achieve reliable, concrete knowledge on which we could act to change the social world for the better” (O’reilly, 2005, p. 45). Social scientists from many disciplines applied positivist methods and concepts (such as validity, reliability, objectivity, and generalizability) to their research. By the 1930s and 1940s, however, the ontology on which logical positivism was built—that a fixed reality existed that could be measured and known—had received much criticism. Most who work within this paradigm today would agree that the world is not knowable with certainty, and they accept that measurement is fallible. They also grant that complete objectivity is not possible and that all researchers are biased by their historical contexts and sociocultural experiences. Nonetheless, they continue to use and value procedures and language associated with the scientific method and to assert that research can reveal close enough objective facts to assist in making generalizations and predictions regarding social behavior. This modification of positivism is sometimes referred to as postpositivism. The term postpositivism is used by others to indicate all paradigmatic frameworks that have developed since logical positivism held sway. To avoid this confusion, I am using postempiricism to refer to the modified way of viewing science and inquiry that came after “the demise of the strict empiricism of logical positivism” (Schwandt, 2007, p. 233).
As a postempiricist, your ontological beliefs will include a reality external to people that can be measured and apprehended to some degree of accuracy. Because the world is at least approximately knowable, you will seek to do research in order to make generalizations about social phenomena, to provide explanations about their causes, and to create predictions concerning those phenomena. you will work to gain this knowledge through observations that are as objective as possible, measurements, and carefully designed experiments. y our research methods generally will begin with a theory about the phenomena in question. using that theory, you will pose several hypotheses and then test your hypotheses through methods designed to be objective and to keep you removed from subjects to avoid, as much as possible, your influencing their behavior and responses. The data you collect will be reduced to numerical indices or quantifiable bits of information and will be analyzed statistically. These procedures tend to be called quantitative methods.
Interpretivism
Although ideas found in interpretivism can be traced back to Greek and roman philosophies, interpretivism as a form of social science research grew out of the work of eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and was
